The true ricer spirit lives on.

"There are so many steps involved in tweaking the last uumph out of your linux system- and it really is a work of art to pull it off- I have used many different kernels and all sorts of optimization combinations-yesterday I finally used -noatime and -notail for my reiserfs file system: The single biggest performance boost I have yet to see-now I can have gnome2.2 running using gnome-terminal to compile the latest j2sdk from source (nice -n 19)while browsing with mozilla while running e17 in a seperate login with two eterms and run Unreal Tournament at full speed (this with an apache webserver running for my dyndns pseudo-domain and a mysql for my answering-machine software for my isdn card-which keeps track of all incomming phonecalls and manages my telephone book app and ntfsd/sshd/dhcp server/squid)..."

"its -O3 the letter, not -03 the number"

"I love building all sources from scratch, then it will be optimized and made to run smooth for MY machine. as Debian normally uses binary packages, yeah dependencies crap may happen, that's odd, you might as well just switch to pure source base distro, right."

"I notice that my disk does a whole lot of thrashing when I boot up. I have a lot of stuff that gets loaded into memory every time I boot, like X11, ion2, Firefox, Eterm, Thunderbird, etc. It seems to me that putting all of the files necessary to those apps in a contiguous section on the disk and loading that into memory in one shot would be a whole lot faster. Is there a way to do this? Is it stupid?"

"I use Gentoo because I'm a speed freak - I can't stand the thought that some of my packages might not be running as fast as they could be."

". . . and I liked the idea of running an entire system that wasn't compiled for a 386."

"Without a doubt, Gentoo has set itself apart from every other distro out there. Because it's source-based, it's notorious for its speed. Because of emerge, it's notorious for being simple to maintain."

Yea, I really don't understand all the complaints about the time to install gentoo. It is like complaining about your Ferrari because the dealership was so far away.

"I find it suprising no one has mentioned the fact that Gentoo the only mainstream distro that uses gcc3 for everything. That's what brought me to Gentoo in the first place."

"If Debian people think compiling sucks, well so what? I guess they're satisfied with Someone Else's Binaries. I prefer to play on Gentoo's strengths. I get exactly what I want compiled in -- nothing less, nothing more, and with the optimizations I want."

"Yet, binary distros are riddled with bugs, and are much more annoying to fix given the the cumbersome edit/build package/install package cycle."

"As a Gentoo user what really stands out to me is that this test was clearly biased away from Linux. If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could. It really saddens me to see that people go out of their way to spend so much money on such expensive hardware and then squander their investment by running barely suitable software on it. To me, an extra 0.1% performance increase, even if I am only imagining it to be faster, is certainly worth one day a week recompiling all of the latest packages from source code. Even if I do occasionally get my CFLAGS in a muddle! I think I speak for Slashdot when I say that Gentoo is the only sane option for getting the most from your hardware!"

"And what about Gentoo? I think that this is the best distribution to run on a 64-bit processor. Perhaps the test needs to be reworded to "without any manual recompiling" and then redone. Compiling all your software yourself, optimized for your processor, gives you a great speed boost. I think this is one major advantage where Linux excels in comparison to Windows."

"Personally, I can tell a difference between my Gentoo install and my previous Redhat install. What's the deal with these people? He can't possibly be right..."

"I know how much everyone here loves optimized software. This is why I was surprised to read today on the GNOME mailing list that Ubuntu is taking advantage of some optimization opportunities that I think Gentoo is missing out on."